Speaking at an academic conference at UPenn, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, urged students that they shouldn't use the online encyclopedia for class projects. It is not, he claims, a definitive source. "It is pretty good, but you have to be careful of it. It's good enough, depending on what your purpose is."
Good enough...
Although Wikipedia frowns on subjects of an entry from editing their own bio, this hasn't stopped Wales from editing his own entry 18 times, including a revision whereby he alone is the founder of Wikipedia.
Revisionism...
Wales says, "Over the past three years, the quality of Wikipedia has improved dramatically," as some 600 to 1,000 contributors help maintain the integrity of "up to 75 percent of the site's entries."
Only 25% of the information is wrong!
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It's more accurate than librarians. (Go down to "Reference Performance Revisited.")
To be fair, the old studies saying that librarians give accurate answers only 50% of the time has been questioned mightily. And sometimes we don't give a full answer because the patron is doing in-depth research or needs a variety of sources, and so it's unreasonable to quantify those "answers" as right or wrong.
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